What is it about American foreign policy that constantly gets the U.S. military involved in another country or region and then winds up with our troops bogged down in a dimly understood local conflict? Are our strategists and international experts missing something?

When other countries stir up trouble in Latin America or the Caribbean, the U.S. regards this as a violation of its hegemony (the Monroe Doctrine) in its home "sphere of influence." But we seem unable to comprehend that other major countries have their own "spheres of influence" in their regions — Russia in Eastern Europe, Iran in the Persian Gulf area, China in Asia, for example — which they feel very strongly about and are willing to defend by force of arms, if necessary.

Such U.S. ignorance (which derives from a belief that America as the world's self-designated Good Guy and lone superpower can do whatever it wants) inevitably leads to big trouble. For instance, even with the U.S. spread thin and quagmired in Iraq and Afghanistan, the CheneyBush regime seems anxious to provoke a major quarrel with a resurgent Russia in a relatively minor regional dispute in the Caucasus.

In the midst of the juicy theatre of presidential campaigns, it might be wise for all of us to step back and attend to that foreign-policy reality and to consider the grim implications of a renewed Cold War between the U.S. and Russia.

THE LARGER PICTURE

I'm not just referring to the
contretemps over what's happening in the Caucasus right now, especially
with regard to Georgia. No, we're talking about major realignments of
political, economic and military forces that, if not handled correctly,
could put Russia and the U.S. into a potential active conflict.

It's
clear that John McCain and his neo-conservative backers would look
forward to such a confrontation; they thrive on crisis; it's where they
come alive and can roll out their black/white simplicities and threats
to use force, utilize an "enemy" as their way to increase their
domestic power, cranking-up the old military-industrial complex. And,
at least for the purposes of the election campaign, Barack Obama and
Joe Biden have joined in, using Russia as a bete noir and are warning Russia to back off and back down and back away.

Part
of the problem is that Superpower America continues to see the world
almost exclusively through U.S. eyes and thus is not taking into
account how the world appears to Russia and others. Thus, diplomacy is
ignored and the Cold War, and potential hot wars, draw closer. And, of
course, all this is taking place between two fading empires, as new
major powers emerge in Asia/South Asia (China, India). Russia and the
U.S., in effect, are battling for regional dominance before the new
movers and shakers are fully up to speed.

"SCARE HELL OUT OF AMERICAN PEOPLE"

To
better understand the current Russia/U.S. clash in the Caucasus, and
why Russia is moving so aggressively in its perceived "sphere of
influence," we need a bit of historical context.

My area of
concentration in graduate school was the origin of the Cold War, and my
dissertation was on the "Truman Doctine," the governmental policy that
declared for the first time that the U.S. would launch a global
struggle against what was seen as a monolithic Soviet Empire bent on
worldwide communist domination.

Actually, President Truman in
1947 was mainly interested in a much smaller issue — sending financial
and military aid to Greece and Turkey, to keep them safely within the
Western fold — but was informed by Senate Republican leaders that the
only way he'd get a large-scale aid-appropriation through Congress was
to "scare hell out of the American people." So Truman refashioned his
message by talking about a Soviet Union moving toward "worldwide
domination" through the use of force, a red menace that had to be
stopped in its tracks before it conquered the globe.

Thus the
Truman Doctrine was born, Greece and Turkey got their money, and the
U.S. from that time forward was locked-into battling "world communism"
wherever it seemed to be raising its head. The result was that the U.S.
sent massive cash infusions to dictators all over the globe who claimed
they were "fighting communism." (Similar today to any tinpot dictator
who claims to be "fighting terrorism.") In reality, much of that
anti-communist U.S. money went into Swiss bank accounts or was used to
crush reform movements in those countries, the effect of which was to
push reformers toward revolutionary options. The debacle in Vietnam can
be traced back to the ramifications of that earlier Truman Doctrine.

Please
don't misunderstand me. Stalinist communism (like fundamentalist Islam
today) was a despicably brutal, totalitarian system. And Stalin was a
monstrous authoritarian leader, who did entertain
theorhetical/ideological dreams of communist uprisings abroad. But,
though he was a certifiable paranoid, Stalin was not a madman in how he
related to the outside world. Despite the conventional myth, he had no
desire or ability (don't forget that 20 million Soviet citizens lost
their lives in World War II) to take over the world by force

SOVIETS' NEED FOR A BUFFER

My
research confirmed that Stalin was an old-style national leader who
wanted, at all costs, to protect the homeland and home base of
communism, which is why he was so desirous of controlling the Eastern
Europe countries and Baltic states as part of the Soviet empire. They
would serve as a protective buffer between the Soviet Union and Western
Europe, from whence three European leaders' armies invaded Mother
Russia: Napoleon, then Kaiser Wilhelm, and then Hitler.

Whenever
confronted elsewhere, Stalin tended to back away, abandoning local
Communist Parties to the tender mercies of their enemies, the example
of the Greek Communist Party being a case in point. (My Master's
thesis, by the way, was on the Greek Civil War of that period.)

There
was so much misunderstanding, misreading, among the Allies that led to
so much Cold War misery when WWII was over. And we're repeating the
pattern today. Just one contextual episode, which I've written about
previously: ( www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0505/S00255.htm )

Stalin
couldn't understand why Truman and other Western leaders were screaming
so loudly about his harsh treatment of the Eastern Europeans absorbed
into his satellite-states buffer zone after the end of the war. After
all, he reasoned, the Americans and British had recognized his right to
control those states in the so-called "percentages agreement" or
"spheres of influence" agreement worked out in a secret Moscow meeting
in October 1944.

THE "PERCENTAGES AGREEMENT"

Short
history: At that meeting, Churchill gave Stalin a piece of paper on
which he had written percentages of which allies in the post-war period
would control which countries in their "sphere of influence." Since the
Red Army was (or soon would be) effectively in control of most of
Eastern Europe, and neither the Americans nor Brits had the
wherewithall (or desire) to fight another massive war right after
defeating the Germans, they recognized the reality of Soviet boots on
the ground and gave Stalin 90% control of Rumania and so on, while the
Brits got 90% control in Greece, Yugoslavia was 50-50, etc. Stalin
began acting under this agreement during the final year of the war, and
the Americans and Brits likewise honored the percentages pact,
seemingly unconcerned about the brutal way Stalin was absorbing Eastern
Europe into the Soviet empire.

Upon the death of FDR, President
Truman took over. After war ended and with anti-communism affecting
domestic politics, Truman began objecting to the Soviet Union's harsh
behavior in Eastern Europe. Stalin interpreted the strong Western
reaction to his unbridled use of power in that "sphere-of-influence"
region as reneging on a solemn agreement; his paranoia convinced him
that the West was out to try to overthrow him, so he conceded that the
"percentages agreement" was no longer in place and began making life
more difficult for America elsewhere in the world.

So there was
that gross misunderstanding from the Soviet side. What about the U.S.?
Americans, including most government officials, had just fought a war
against one set of totalitarians and now were confronted with another,
in the form of Stalin's Soviet Union. They tended to see this movement
as monolithic and as aimed at world domination, so anything the Soviets
did was interpreted in that light.

"NATIONALIST COMMUNISM"

The
Soviets talked such a good game about "international communism,"
centrally directed from Moscow, that the Americans had no inkling that
something called "nationalist communism" existed, or even could exist.
If they had, they might have altered their foreign policy accordingly,
recognizing that Tito's communism in Yugoslavia was distinctly
different from Stalin's in Russia, from Mao's in China or from Ho Chi
Minh's in Vietnam. Antagonisms among and between Communist regimes
abounded, and nationalism almost always was stronger than a monolithic
ideology. (An analagous distortion today would be America viewing
radical Islam through the lens of a monolithic Al-Qaida, supposedly
pulling all the militant and terrorist strings around the world. If it
ever was, it's not that way now.)

After communism imploded in
the Soviet Union and its satellite states in the late-1980s, Russia
went into a decade-long psychological and economic tailspin. But Russia
has climbed back, economically and militarily stronger and determined
to re-assert what it considers its rightful superpower status in its
"sphere of influence" and in the world. And, once again, it sees its
major threats coming from the West, engineered mainly by the United
States.

RUSSIA NERVOUS ABOUT MISSILES, NATO

The
U.S., for example, is luring former Soviet-satellite countries
(Georgia, Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic States, etc.) toward the European
Union and, especially frightening to Russia, into NATO, the military
pact originally set up to stop the Soviet Union from even thinking
about moving westwards. Putin, like Stalin, sees his country's "sphere
of influence" being violated, with Russia being ringed by potentially
hostile enemies, effectively controlled by the U.S. and other Western
powers.

This growing split between Russia and the U.S. has been
building since the early 1990s, (
www.stratfor.com/weeklygeorgia_and_kosovo_single_intertwined_crisis )
with Putin, for example, warning the U.S. not to position its
missile-defense system in the former Warsaw Pact states in Eastern
Europe. But just the other day, Poland signed an agreement to do just
that (as did the Czechs earlier) and the Russians are furious. The U.S.
claims that the system is aimed at stopping incoming missiles from
rogue states like Iran, but few believe that unlikely rationale. The
Russians, not unrealistically, are convinced that the missile-defense
system is aimed at them, and is provocative in the extreme, placed as
it is right next to its borders. (Look how freaked out the U.S. got in
the early-1960s — ready to go to war — when the Soviet Union put
nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles off the American coast.)

When
President Saakashvili ordered Georgian troops into South Ossetia and
Abkhazia, two ethnic-Russian regions inside Georgia that wished to
break away and be annexed by their Russian neighbor, Putin and Russian
president Medvedev ordered their "peacekeeping" troops (there under a
U.N. resolution) to resist and sent tanks and troops across the
Georgian border to occupy large parts of Georgia. Putin said he's
convinced that the Americans approved of their ally Saakashvili's
invasion since the U.S. has been building up Georgia for years with
military weapons and training.

HIT THE BEAR ON THE NOSE

But
whether the U.S. openly urged Saakashvili to invade, acquiesed to it,
or was somewhat surprised by it, the point is that the proxy
confrontation between Russia and the U.S. was on, and the two sides
began their move toward a dangerous renewal of the Cold War. Without
even acknowledging Georgia's brutal invasion of Ossieta and Abkhazia,
American leaders — out of knee-jerk anti-Russianism — started bashing
the Russian bear for its harsh occupation in Georgia, including
CheneyBush, John McCain, and Barack Obama/Joe Biden.

We'll
probably never know for sure who "started" this current phase of the
long-simmering conflict between Georgia and Russia. This situation
there, and in the Caucasus in general, is infinitely complex, steeped
in nationalistic, tribal and ideological rivalries that are barely
understandable, and dangerous for Americans to get sucked into. But
that didn't stop McCain, a neo-con warmonger of the first order, from
immediately making ill-advised, threatening anti-Russia comments. (Not
incidentally, McCain's foreign-policy advisor, Randy Scheunemann, up
until a few months ago was a lobbyist for the Georgian government and
his firm continues in that role.) Even the initially-cautious
CheneyBush Administration jumped into the name-calling and threatening,
joined in a bit later, with only slightly more sense of nuance, by the
Democratic nominee Obama. (Biden, in his acceptance speech, was even
more outspoken in his angry denunciation of Russia.)

Neo-con
Dick Cheney is being dispatched to Georgia (
http://wiredispatch.com/news/?id=322777 ) as a hard-line message to
Putin that the U.S. is not backing off its support of Georgia's
anti-Russian stance. The U.S. is moving toward isolating Russia,
starting by kicking it out of the G-8, blocking its ascension to the
WTO, cutting back on investments, etc. Even the conservative British
journal The Economist believes there are dangers in these kinds of
moves that need to be measured against possible consequences:

>> "Suspending
business as usual should not be pushed to the point that drives Russia
into the sort of sulk that will make its behaviour worse. Finding the
line between disapproval, pressure and continued engagement will be
hard. ... But there is vital work to be done — on nuclear proliferation
and arms reduction, for example — in which the need for cooperation
with Russia simply outweighs the need to punish it." ( www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11965287 )

That
intelligent prescription requires highly nuanced diplomatic smarts —
and some understanding of Russia's perception of its "sphere of
influence" — neither of which is much in evidence in the nation's
capital these days.

ELECTION-YEAR POSTURING

Because
of the high stakes involved, our working alliance with Russia is
crucially important. We don't need to approve of their leadership,
their ambitions in their region, or how democracy is being compromised
inside Russia. But the U.S. does need their help in negotiations with
Iran, for example. Additionally, given the fact that the Russians still
possess thousands of nuclear missiles, one would have hoped for cooler
U.S. heads to prevail, that at least a move toward high-level diplomacy
would have been made before the harsh threats were issued.

But,
no. It's an election season. The big verbal guns were hastily moved
into place and firing began, with Medyedev responding by recognizing
the "independence" of the two breakaway regions in Georgia and telling
the Americans they're not afraid of a new Cold War. (
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26403580 ) Russia says it will be deploying its
missiles at a wide variety of locations, and aiming them at Western
European capitals. The other day, it test-fired a new ICBM, (
www.correntewire.com/some_damn_fool_thing_in_pipelineistan ) designed
to defeat an anti-missile system, as a metaphorical warning shot across
the bow of American policy.

In short, the two countries are not
playing patty-cake here. The evolving relationship with Russia is
loaded with potentially explosive dangers, and great care needs to be
exercised to keep that relationship on an even keel for the good of
both countries, for Europe, and for stability in the world. So far,
good sense seems in short supply and thus the two fading empires slide
closer to confrontation and potential war.

Are you reading much
about this in your local newspaper? Hear any serious discussions about
this on national TV? I thought not. The politicians and mass-media are
focusing on who's wearing a flag-pin, Paris Hilton and what candidate
is ahead by two points in the daily poll. And thus we drift toward
disaster.#

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D,, has taught government &
international relations at universities in California and Washington,
worked for two decades as a writer/editor with the San Francisco
Chronicle, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers
(www.crisispapers.org). To comment: crisispapers@comcast.net .

Liberal Hypocrisy
The hypocrisy of liberals never cease to amaze me - Russia is entitled to a 'sphere of influence'? I wonder when was the last time you wrote a similar "love story" for the USA. Your obvious love for Stalin and his failed ideas blinds you to this hypocrisy and so just ask yourself? Would you defend the US if it had been in Russia's shoes or you would be the first in a protest march?